Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
I'm in the car waiting for my parents, parked in the Springfield Plaza with its mock-wood awning and signs lit from behind--Morton's and Color Tile and Baskin-Robbins and Circuit City and Today's Man and a CVS drugstore, where today I had to secretly get the A-200 crab-removal system because I am home for Labor Day weekend with my bag of laundry and everything-is-fine smile.
I felt those little crabs on the entire bus ride down from New York City, but I stupidly didn't really notice them until I was crammed into the seat by the bathroom in the back of the Peter Pan bus, breathing the stuffy air, the sun magnifying into the side of my face and thigh, a chewed-up piece of Wrigley's Spearmint gum cooking in the windowsill's black rubber craw and giving off a nauseating saliva-mint fume. An awful, tubby man in front of me yanked his seat all the way back and snored the entire time, and then, halfway through the ride, went to the bathroom. When he opened the door, the hideous fusion of waste and gum and blue chemical disinfectant made me swallow hard.
I was up all night last night, and I quietly left the apartment this morning so Benny wouldn't come out of his room and confront me, and I hauled my duffel bag to Port Authority and got on the Peter Pan bus.
I sat next to a little peach-fuzzy fourteen-year-old who was listening to Sugar Ray very loudly, his earphones seeping tinny cimbal crashings into the stale air. He looked out the window the whole trip with his arm on the thin window ledge, and it looked like a cylinder of butter with little glinting hairs on it. Oh ho, if you knew what was ahead of you, I thought. Whatever you end upbeing attracted to, little boy, in twelve, thirteen, fourteen years you will be sitting here, like me, and you will be as shocked as I am now that you are twenty-eight and the kind of person who says "Oh, if you knew what was ahead of you" to yourself and has crabs.
For four hours I read through my diary from this summer--a documentation of day after humid day, malarial rain and softened asphalt, my stupid temp job at the American Liver Association, stops at the ATM machine, all the bars and clubs filled with guys I tried to fixate on, my wicked roommate Benny's fucked-up loyalty, and of course beautiful, slippery Eric, who floods my mind if I let him. When I looked at these wheezy entries I had no cool detachment; I wanted him all over again. His powder his blondness his beautiful shoulders his calligraphy body. I read words I wrote about him and headed right back into that zone of poetry where he is suspended, humming and warm. The fact that Eric has a boyfriend is dry, empirical data, as unsatisfying as dusty crackers. My fantasies don't have solid floors or sober bulb wattage. An image of seeing Eric on 6th Street in daylight becomes redder and warmer and bottomless and shifts into kissing and kissing and then becomes completely unreal as we make it to our Virgin Atlantic Premium Economy seats, taking another trip to Umbria because my good friend Jorie won't be at her villa until October.
I think the kid next to me tried to peek at my diary, but it's his fault if he was freaked out reading through my pathetic slippage into love, only to come home to Springfield in itchy defeat.
When I got to the house I said hello to my parents, who seem so stable and bifocaled now. Hey, I'm gonna borrow the car! I said, pretending to jingle change happily while I secretly itched myself, and then I drove their new Cutlass to CVS. I walked in through the automated doors as efficiently as possible, trying to detect A-200's location with a casual face-past the It's a Spooky Halloween! paper plates, paper cups, and paper picnic tablecloths; past the Back to School shelves with their spirals and crayons and glue; the shampoo shelves, gel shelves, conditioner shelves, black-hair shelves, cotton balls, astringents, foot care, skin care, moisturizers, exfoliators, replenishers, removers, testers, to the subject of lice, below Band-Aids and Mercurochrome. I bought it, and as the cashier teen bleeped the scanner gun and nicely stapled the receipt to the bag, I thought again, Oh, if you knew what was ahead of you.
I took my crinkly CVS bag up to my bathroom, with the familiar maroon-and-foil wallpaper and salmon cups and toothbrush stand. The bathroom where I believed I was being observed for social-sexual-scientific experiments when I was seven, where I saw my pubic hair grow, where I ran and hid from my brother Mark, where I scrambled when I saw him getting a massage from Ken Fenning, where I danced and moussed my hair and tried my mother's eyeliner and wore satin shorts.
I applied the lice killer, waiting ten minutes, shampooing, combing out nits, until my genitals ached. The Crabs of Guilt. The Crabs of Embarrassment. I am embarrassed that I actually thought there was an honest pathway to my lie of a life: a simple existence with Benny as a friend and me falling in love with Eric, when in actuality Benny is a skulking freak and Eric is probably enjoying a fulfilling sexual fiesta with his boyfriend right now.
A-200 is clear and soapy and smells of some old-fashioned witch hazel tonic that you'd find at your grandparents' house. They must make A-200 smell nostalgic so that when you use it your grandparents float around you like ghosts, and you feel even more dirty as you rid yourself of crabs.
Hornito. Copyright © by Mike Albo. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
